Hello! I need some advice on newspaper clippings, specifically clippings from local newspapers for local history purposes.

At the moment, I'm physically clipping articles out of the newspaper and glueing them to sheets of A4 paper, then labelling them with name/date/page of newspaper and subject of article (usually a specific local business [someone else is doing this for specific local people]). This is a giant faff.

What I would like to do is take photos of the articles, label them in the filename (perhaps with keywords too), and back them up in multiple places. However I wonder if copyright law would stop me sharing these photos with others in the future. Or if there's any other disadvantage of doing it this way.

I would like to preserve these clippings (physical or digital) for the long term; they might eventually go to Croydon local studies, or to the CNHSS. (I'm aware of newspaper digitisation projects, e.g. the excellent British Newspaper Archive, but I do think it's worth preserving things in more than one way and with more than one focus.)

Any advice?

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If you shared the digital version similarly to how you'd share the hard copy, then that's pretty squarely fair use. So, technological worries aside, you're in no worse a place scanning them than if you'd clipped them. From there, you can justify any further uses when they're actually happening, in relation to the law as it stands at that point.

I'd hazard a guess that if you're taking well-framed phone pics, there's less work involved than clipping and gluing, and in the long-term, as a private individual, digital storage will be much less of a burden than a large paper archive.

[...] you're in no worse a place scanning them than if you'd clipped them.

Thanks, you've summed up the essence of my question here in fewer words than I managed!

I'd hazard a guess that if you're taking well-framed phone pics, there's less work involved than clipping and gluing, and in the long-term, as a private individual, digital storage will be much less of a burden than a large paper archive.

Yes, exactly. This is why I'd rather move to digital storage, but I want to make sure I'm not cutting off any important possibilities by doing that.